Abstract
Healthy individuals often exhibit prioritized processing of aversive information, as manifested in enhanced orientation of attention to threatening stimuli compared with neutral items. In contrast to this adaptive behavior, anxious, fearful, and phobic individuals show exaggerated attention biases to threat. In addition, they overestimate the likelihood of encountering their feared stimulus and the severity of the consequences; both are examples of expectancy biases. The co-occurrence of attention and expectancy biases in fear and anxiety raises the question about causal influences. Herein, we summarize findings related to expectancy biases in fear and anxiety, and their association with attention biases. We suggest that evidence calls for more comprehensive research strategies in the investigation of mutual influences between expectancy and attention biases, as well as their combined effects on fear and anxiety. Moreover, both types of bias need to be related to other types of distorted information processing commonly observed in fear and anxiety (e.g., memory and interpretation biases). Finally, we propose new research directions that may be worth considering in developing more effective treatments for anxiety disorders.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 83-95 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Clinical Psychology Review |
Volume | 42 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Dec 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant PZ00P1_140060 awarded to T. Aue and by the Marie Curie Actions CIG grant 34206 and the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel Young Investigator Research grant 145-14-15 awarded to H. Okon-Singer. We would like to thank Noga Cohen and Tomer Shechner for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd.
Keywords
- Anxiety
- Attention bias
- Combined bias hypothesis
- Expectancy bias
- Fear
- Phobia
- Threat
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Clinical Psychology
- Psychiatry and Mental health